She
by Albrecht Starkarm
Summary: A commission from HeartfeltHylian. World turned upside-down. War is a novocained heart grasping the broken glass. My life is a map without shapes, lost in a place that wants to hear about the Good War. The war that never happened. Love is dead. Or maybe love is a pretty green-eyed therapist trying to drag me back to life. Is there a PX in hell? Kiss the napalmed sunrise.


She

By

Albrecht Starkarm

I had a dream I was someone else. It isn't the only time I've ever had the dream. And I don't mean the kind of dreams where you're an adventurer, where you're trudging through strange brokeback and unknowable places under alien suns, where the night burns indigo and there's no rain and no dust, either. I don't mean the kind of dreams where you're half-in-half-out-of-body, an alienation from the flesh without knowing the perfect dislocation in the third-person, where you're not even second-person but just kind of _there_, too; you're a passenger and along for the narrative's ride, uncontrollable but with a perfect suspended disbelief.

Because I've had those kinds of dreams, too. Where I was a vindictive and strange and reality-agnostic beauty, long and full and shapely, but with a hard-edged impossibility; a Japanimation grace without the implausible eyes and the megacephalic proportions and the lipless heavy-chested gravity-indifference. In that dream, I was a demoness in puce silk, and it takes supreme courage to wear a color that close to the word _puke_. She was courageous. A brace of heavy iron-shafted meat-ripping instruments slung over her shoulder, warhammer and scythe and ax. An avenger without a reason for vengeance.

One of the Furies. I guess they're called Erinyes in Greek. I don't know where I'd read that. But you never used their names. That was the kind of superstitious invitation to seeing them in a place and a time and a land where thoughts and fears and fantasies take on a magic quality in a dreamtime impossibility. Where your most passionate cringing horrors are your lusts, too, and they'll appear by conjuration or incantation if you even let your lips cradle 'em. They called them _Eumenides_. It's "the good ones" or something.

I didn't really remember. Maybe I didn't care about remembering. But that's kind of beside the point, anyway, isn't it? Because that wasn't the dream. I wasn't one of the Eumenides. I was just someone else. And I stared at the ceiling in a perfectly ordinary room and life was perfectly ordinary, because it had always been ordained to be.

God was in His heaven and all was right with the world, _Pippa Passes_ as perfect prophecy. The ceiling didn't shudder and quake and didn't melt and drip on my face and there wasn't the sudden hard snap of epiphany nothing was real and probably nothing would ever be real again.

And more than anything, in that dream, I was another girl. I was a girl whose hands weren't callused and hardened and they'd never been washed in blood. It was another girl. The girl who'd never touched a rifle's cold greasy steel and clammy black plastic and never stared into the world in briers and thickets and who'd never known the triple canopy's pitiless cowling black, so heavy and bleak it was another place where mist turned to its own self-enclosed rain pattering on your shoulders.

Where I'd never laughed with the other guys when we stood in the clearing with a dumbass reporter, new creased play-pretend Captain Commando battledress, Why, I'll betcha you guys get some great sunsets 'round here, doncha?

That girl would never have felt the salt crust on her fading utilities, smooth soft synthetics and cotton stiffened like canvas, tortured with the sun's sneering inferno and then the night's sticky stagnant dark stillness and always forever sweating, sweating, a goddamned twelve-salt-tabs-a-day kind of sweat. She never would've known what a salt tab even was unless maybe she, I dunno, maybe she was a distance runner or a hiking enthusiast and she'd slip out into the wilderness without a sense of dread grinding hard on her shoulders and something turning over cold and slippery like an eel in the space between her gut and her throat.

She was the kind of girl who'd never felt hot blood slick like metal powder and red corn syrup on her fingers, hard death-grip on the dagger, the fucking stiletto too fucking short, why, why, _why_ can't I push it in a little farther, why won't you just die, motherfucker, just fucking die, won't you, what's your goddamn problem it's not like I'm asking you to do something unreasonable, right, chink?

Laughter. Laughter in the darkness. Sorry Charlie's smile telling everyone he'd heard the Joke, oh, he got it, he'd heard the Joke and he was safe, beckoning with rotting lips, C'mon in, the water's fine, it's all dark here and you can sleep as long as you want, huh?

Faraway Arclight rumble like tolling thunder. Turn the night to day in sharp pulsating flashes, lie down on the cold forever earth and feel it tremble, shock balloons blasting up and extinguishing the fire from the big motherfucking Buffs bringing down the hate from 50,000 feet, flyboys who'd never known a day on the ground like angels with chromium feathers over the filth unless Charlie got lucky and put a SAM up a tailpipe, and then we'd be out there, mortal combat with the guys who played Cowboys and Indians for real and for keeps and there was never any argument, never any bitching about how unfair it was you got me! I got you, motherfucker. You always knew.

But that girl wasn't even dead. She'd just never been alive. Life didn't have the dignity to make her stillborn, buried with the other _could-have-beens-what-ifs_? in the potter's field where they came to forget the lives never tasted. The girl who wore pink bows in her soft red hair and had big _really_ big tits 'cause exercise was bouncing around in a club's throbbing dark pit and maybe squirming around with her first boyfriend, slow and uneasy but with gut in her neck, oh, God, is this right? Should it bleed this much?

I had a dream I was someone else.

_Plop-plop-plop_. You ever wake up and you're somewhere else? I was fucking sure it was Bonnie again. She hadn't even lost it. We were all too far-gone to have lost it. She was just bored. She'd always been a nice girl. I'd known her since junior high. Yeah, she was a goddamned bitch, but there's a difference between being the arrogant brown-skinned soft-hipped soft-lipped cheerleader bestriding the world like a teen-queen Colossus and someone who'd hunch there, skin chapped and weatherbeaten like everyone else's on that coral nightmare, ass suddenly too small planted on her helmet like a chair, flicking pebbles into that chink machine-gunner's open head.

He'd died where he sat. Frozen behind the big .50 cal, perfect trigger discipline, thumbs off the spades, slitted slant eyes empty black pits from the 7.62 that'd caught him square in the head and carved off a big chunk of the skull and brain and scalp with the helmet opened up like a tin can and flipped away on the hard coral rock next to him. It'd rained like it always did on Peleliu with the rotting rusted wreckage from our granddads' and greatgranddads' war and the rain was always sudden and sharp and shocking.

It came hard, gushed from the sky clogged with dirty scudding clouds, and then it'd be gone in a few minutes. A few seconds. Caught out Ron once when he'd stripped down and kinda lost it, peeled off his utilities, his flak jacket, his kevlar, fuck it, fuck it, I can't take the goddamn stink anymore, I gotta take a bath, I gotta take a goddamned shower and I don't fucking care.

Soaped up, cock in his right hand, polishing off the ugly black grime with his left. And then the shower stopped before he was finished.

This rain had been longer. The chink machine-gunner's pit, gunner dead with his assistant and ammo-carriers with four fast deliberate shots from the ridge, it was a puddle. And his skull was, too, like a goblet filled with water and boiling with flies screaming with a hideous sound; an overfilled beehive, shrieking and angry and throbbing with their big quavering wings. Bonnie just sat there, flicking pebbles into the chink's open head.

I wondered about that. Wondered about what that meant for all of us, watching the pretty cheerleader with her dark skin even darker and her big eyes bloodshot and with that stare that never really met you up-close, tossing bits of the broken coral that turned into a powdery gray sludge on everything during the rains into the chink's head.

I didn't even ask her to stop. It was just too weird. Bonnie'd always been nice. She'd always been pretty. She'd always figured in at least a few wet dreams and it was never with a rifle black on her lap in battledress turned gray with dust and mud and sweat like glass leaches gelled on her skin.

It wasn't Bonnie. It was the rain. Slow and pattering and it was like always. Eyes jerking open because there was never that slow princessly movement anymore. Never eased them open. Never with a delicate little flutter, lashes beating at your cheeks, chirruping birds and chattering squirrels and chipmunks' adorable squeaks and barks in your ears.

No Disney bullshit. No adorable small animals sang in my ears. Just the rain, _plop-plop-plop_, heavy fat droplets slapping at the eaves until it stopped. My eyes were closed, and then they were opened. Dreams aren't what you see in the movies or the shitty books. All that post-traumatic stress shit, shellshock, oh, the vet wakes up like a bad _Jacob's Ladder_ fantasy, they're fucking nuts, screaming, Charlie's gonna get me, Charlie's gonna get me, cold sweats.

It's not that. Exactly.

A hard rap at the door. The room was like it always was. Problem was, I wasn't. The bed wasn't too short and the sheets weren't uncomfortable but they weren't what they should've been. Pink. Who the hell has pink sheets? Pretty and adorable and laced with intricate Gallic scrollwork _fleurs-de-lis_ in blue and walls and carpet and ceiling in cream and the shutters were half-shut. Sunlight leaked through, sticky and sickening and bronze when the sun roared back into the sky.

_I_ was fucking sick. Sick 'cause I'd hammered back God knew how much booze and grass and that shit climbs down in your stomach and has an all-out _West Side Story_ brawl. There was still a hefty roach on the end table, melting into a sticky nauseous bronze puddle of cannabis resin.

_Honey, are you up yet?_

I wondered who the voice was. My own mother, and the immediate thought was: Jesus, is it Lieutenant Coleman again? Not mom's voice even sounded anything like L-T Coleman. But there was just that chest-clutching crack of pure idiot horror. Not terror. Horror.

L-T Coleman bought it in Manila. Pushing back the chinks. Always the unending refrain, Watch your corners, be careful, goddammit, make sure you keep your fuckin' head down. She was ferocious. Beautiful in the way anyone would be sure a valkyrie must've been, stark blonde Germanic, hair thick and like spun platinum and knotted in a tight bun under her helmet, everything drawn taut, eyes sapphires washed of every bit of pity and benevolence and empathy in the celestial waters where Achilles was bathed and she just had the bad luck of trying to orient herself, looked around a corner.

Flopped back and _then_ there was the sound, a half-second later, a flat rumble down the street.

_Sniper! Jesus Christ, get the fuck down! Get down!_

Coleman's eyes empty, blue filling red with blood, hands still in a death-grip on her rifle so hard Graves Registration had to hack off her fingers to get it back.

_Honey? Are you awake yet? It's, uh, it's almost noon._

Who fuckin' cared.

That was the answer I knew mom wouldn't want to hear. Finally planted my palms on the sheets and shoved myself up and it felt like trying to surface from a jello ocean. Sweat plastered on my cheeks and rolling down my face and melting my hair to my back and tits and I'd finally let it grow again. My tits, too. Fat pushing itself inexorably back through places it'd abandoned years before that.

_Honey? Honey?_

Panic.

I could already hear it.

Oh, Jesus, did she do something stupid?

"Yeah. Yeah. I'm awake. I'm awake. Christ." The last a subdued little rasp. A bottle of cheap brandy on bed stand with the roach. An empty water glass from when I'd hammered back a full gulp of it last night.

Sprawled out there, three-fingers deep, and then suddenly everything went numb and dry like the goddamned Sahara even with those visions of Bonnie going down on me, reality colliding with fantasy, keep out the flat-eyed girl with the rifle on her knees flicking pebbles into the chink machine-gunner's empty head like tossing pennies into a pond.

I usually just smoked grass. Usually. Dragged it out of its dying puddle, half-melted, jammed the crispy wet-and-dried filter pipe between my lips and groped dumbly around for the lighter. It was mine. I'd had it since we finished Reorientation.

What a goddamned joke that was. Teenage superheroes repurposed as commandos when the barrel started getting dry, too many American and Canadian and European boys already fed into the Chinese meat-grinder, all the empty promises about our Perfect Readiness, Pacific Dominance, We Will Be There to Protect Our Allies, No Dominoes Will Fall, well, that was all bullshit.

The goddamned chinks had too many. Everybody'd always thought they wouldn't fight and die for an emptying-out Communism, too many bleak factories belching black smoke, too many slaves, and maybe it would've been true if it hadn't been for the Salvation Revolution. Not Hong Kong but Shanghai, send the old Generals' and Chairman's blood slopping red in the dirty streets like Paris in 1789, guillotines and bayonets and just old-fashioned pistols against the back of the head, greasy cheap metal jammed into well-coiffed hair, We find you guilty of betraying the Revolution and collaboration with the hated Capitalist enemy, how do you plead we don't fucking care, because you're guilty and you're going to die.

_Crack_.

I was happy.

At least, 'til the ships started washing up on the Philippines' shore. 'til the Japanese were screaming, unhinged, Motherfucker, aren't you proud American boys going to do anything? What about the Marines on Okinawa?

Pride.

Arrogance.

The lighter was stamped with Null Spec Ops' group's dagger-slashed-through-zero sigil. Child soldiers who?

Flipped it open with the usual shrill squeak. Old-fashioned combat Zippo. None of the cheap ten-bucks-at-the-novelty-store shit. Irony? From Chinese stock. One of the last. Still with a _Made in Guangzhou_ on its ass.

I had other lighters. Some of 'em American-made; half of those looted from the chinks on Peleliu, on Manila. Some of 'em in Guangzhou's rubble. No heart-of-the-Reich shit. Pure sun-blasted heat and hatred and bayonets snapping off in ribs and, hell, maybe it was heart-of-the-Reich shit even if nobody ever reached Beijing before the chinks finally just gave it up. Kind of.

Read in a _TIME_ they weren't as whipped as they're supposed to be. But I was home, so what'd it matter? Sparked the lighter with a flint's soft rasp. A crackle; sickening acrid petrochemical flash of naphtha climbing up in a snake-charmer's sapphire-tipped orange flame. The joint protested like everything else. Finally gave with a soft shiver. Blue sweet smoke hot in my lungs.

_May I come in, honey?_

"Sure. Sure." No idiot smiles. I'd gotten high with Ron once. Before. The Great Before. Something from some cousin from Israel, Arab shit she'd bought from Lebanon, don't tell me they don't have any unfair advantages when some douchebag gets through colonoscopic security just 'cause she's flying El Al and no one wants to piss off some whiny Zionist won't even goddamn fight the Chinese.

It was nauseating. For him, too. We'd both been flung on our knees, anxious joint-shaking alternation in worshiping the porcelain throne in his bathroom's cold tiles bodies going icy, Jesus fucking Christ, what's the fun in this, huh? Where's the fun in hurling everything and then his sexy cousin, black eyes glossy black hair big tits big butt and long legs, You two retards smoked _how_ much for your first joint? Goddamn. No wonder.

"Oh, God. I thought I told you not to smoke in the house, Kim." No _Kimberly Ann__ Possible, what do you think you're doing?_

Mom was perfect. Like she always was. Fine, it was almost noon, but catch her at six in the morning and it's the fucking same. Immaculately coiffed and ironed down and if Middleton, middle-of-nowhere, hadn't been in the Midwest, I would've made her for Southern after hearing it from the chicks in the unit.

_My mama? Yeah. Wears high heels on a fuckin' hike. Southern girls are like that, Impossible. Y'all don't know that?_

Nah.

Sleek. Velvety voluptuous elegance. Long legs and big breasts and round hips and she looked like the perfect lizzie offspring of Scarlett O'Hara and some red-haired Boudica war-goddess. Stalked around in heels even in the house; smooth skin like pale rare alabaster. Blemishless. Everything about her.

Tall. Tall like me. The same impossible polished eyes but in blue and they were nothing like mine and I knew they never would be. There was too much between us. Mom didn't have the kind of eyes I saw when I looked in the mirror.

I tried to tell her a joke once, and she just didn't get it. I knew that meant everything. Recon went up the hill. Charlie got 'em all but one. He died before he could tell anybody what happened.

That cut the chasm between us.

Gave off a soft scent of tropical fruit. Heels a quiet little _crump-crump-crump_ on the carpeting, padding over to the window through a minor debris field of filthy scattered clothes and dirty underwear and castoff shoes.

"It's a really nice day today."

"It rained earlier."

"Do you _really_ have to smoke that stuff in the house, Kim?" Mom didn't even bother turning. Just stood there, creamy blouse, tight white skirt, even shimmery hosiery. "Or at all?"

"Gonna turn narc now-"

"I didn't say that." Bullshit. Old enough to kill. Old enough to drink. Old enough to vote. Never old enough to smoke some delicious sticky herb. "I just- honey, will you cover up? Please?"

"Huh? Oh. Sorry. Thought, y'know, just us girls-"

"Kim, you're an adult now. It's just- it's a little awkward." At least dragged up the thin sheets smeared with enough sweat to make it pretty much perfunctory. "Thank you." Mom turned. Stared at me with those serene beautiful eyes.

My eyes weren't beautiful. At least, I had that idea.

"Something wrong with my boobs-"

"Kim, just cover up, okay?" At least I could laugh. Kind of. Maybe it was that stupid cheek-pulling giddiness from the grass, but I was already humming high and jubilant. Dumped a finger of shitty sickening brandy into the water glass and swallowed it back. "Will- are you already drinking?"

"I'm sure it's nine in the morning somewhere." It wasn't one of those mass-market ones made to be palatable to plebeian tastes looking for flavor. No aging. No pretension of appealing to common palates.

It was from Taiwan. I'd started loving it when you could pick it up from any quartermaster if you promised to souvenir 'em a chink pistol or rifle or even a unit patch, something to let the REMFs get laid on the fabulous tales of how they'd been all round, to the right, to the left, and it was hard fighting, but our boys came out all right, right? Right.

Tasted like battery acid.

"Why're you drinking that stuff?"

"This? Oh, it's fine. Napoleon never had better brandy."

"I've had it. It's awful. Tastes like it's rotten."

"I think Napoleon pissed in this one. But it's an imperial kind of micturition." Mom always had a way of screwing up her face into an adorable nose-wrinkling twist.

"God, Kim. That's- that's a very vivid image. Aren't you going to get up?"

"Why? Breakfast?"

"No. Well, yes. But you don't remember?"

"Remember what?"

"The parade?" Christ. It had a sound like a lead brick hucked from a sixty-storey building and introducing itself intimately to my forebrain.

"The what?"

"The parade. You _said_ you'd speak when we talked to Mayor Belzer at dinner yesterday."

"I did?" All fairness, I wasn't exactly sober at the time.

"Yes. You- were you drunk?"

"Define drunk."

"Kim." Mom had a way of saying it ringing with _Jesus fucking Christ_ in anyone else's voice. "Were you drunk? You know, with a blood-alcohol level over the legal driving limit?"

"I mean, mom, y'know, to be fair, I flew door gunner on a Venom with that-"

"I'm asking you a serious question. Were you?"

"Yeah." How the hell can a twenty-five-year-old sound like that after about eight years on front lines from Hawaii to Hamburg? "Yeah, I was." Not exactly bashful. Not even embarrassed.

A little petulant.

"Kim, you're- don't you think you're taking it a little too hard? All that alcohol?" Mom just traipsed closer. She had a way of making someone with more than thirty pounds of muscle on her feel like a hunted animal.

Just that pure perfect gentle studied femininity she made look as natural as any production. I knew it wasn't. I knew performance. I knew what faking it 'til you made it meant.

It was the same as the natural truth. It was still all a fraud. Your metabolism was just in on the grift.

Mom snatched the bottle off my bed stand. It gave with a sticky _crack_ from the bilious puddle under it.

"God. When did you buy this?" Disgusting brown whatever slopped around with a soft little _ting_ and splash against the glass. It was about half-empty.

The true answer was _yesterday_.

"I- I dunno. Awhile ago. I don't know-"

"It's Chinese, isn't it?"

"Taiwanese. There's a huge difference. We liberated Taiwan. We blew the shit out of China." Mom just said nothing. Gave me a sidelong look like I was some brat trying to get a rise out of her. Maybe I was.

"Is it safe to drink? If you'd like, I mean..." A slow swallowed breath. The bottle _chunk_ed wet back down on the hardwood. "Just ask dad. Or me. Is it money?"

It was money.

Wasn't money.

The pension was fine. Blood-money. What a goddamned delight. You don't pay for shit when you're one of Uncle Sam's attack dogs. Not food. Not housing. Not shelter. Not utilities. So everything is gravy. Plus combat pay. Plus expert pay.

Plus the little non-disclosure agreement incentive.

_Don't tell anybody you were sixteen when we shoved your ass in a uniform and you can expect to make some more._

Major Torvaldson staring at me with his beady vulture's eyes over a too-big desk. Goddamned lifer pogue sonofabitch.

_Now, Kim, you understand, those were... Serious exigencies. We'd just lost a huge number of men after the Chinese almost took Okinawa. We were really hurting. Different times. You can't apply near-peacetime norms to that, can you?_

Nossir.

_You earned your battlefield commission. From a brevet Sergeant and now you're a Captain. That's nothing to sneeze at. You've earned your pension. If anybody deserved it, it's you people, right?_

Major Torvaldson had the kind of face you could never get sick of staving in with a fist or a donkey dick. Jowls thick with luxuriant fat that'd never known those kinds of wartime exigencies. A generous well-watered gut jutting through a crisply tailored uniform whose lapels you could shave with, so hard and so sharp-edged it was a goddamned mockery of every one of the dog-faces and jarheads and squids and every other grunt that'd sweltered in a hole filling up with their diarrhea shit on a blackened nightmare worked over by artillery like a battered wife.

And here he was, sitting in a luxurious office in Honolulu, soft balmy breezes and air-conditioning so cold it felt like squatting in a chilled can of Budweiser and berating me about what the United States government really needed. What the Alliance needed.

_It's you people, isn't it, Possible?_

What a name.

_If I had my way, you'd all have the Medal of Honor. You'd all have a parade. You'd all be celebrated for the exceptional sacrifices you made._

I'd just sat there and nodded instead of tying up his intestines with his tongue. I didn't know what the fuck was wrong with me. Maybe it was the freedom bird home, that big glistening metal tunnel through the cold bitter blue sky to something I'd cradled in my pocket like Ron had his ridiculous expired taco coupons, _Gonna hafta get back and use these, c'mon, two-for-one? How can you get a better deal? Tell me. Is there a better deal anywhere?_

Or maybe Bonnie with her rumpled crumpled-up cheerleader costume or Wade with his stupid fucking Game Boy he couldn't ever play or any of what we carried with us. But I didn't have anything. None of those talismans. No bibles. No love letters. No passionate promises.

The day after Reorientation, we'd just clapped arms around each other, kissed each other's cheeks, tasted that long lingering warmth and we didn't even know why. But when I'd sat there in Torvaldson's office, Christ, a soldier with an office, it hit me. We were shipping out together. We were in a unit together.

But that was really the last time we'd ever be the people we knew each other as being. Clambering up that C-5's ramp into a black unknowable place and sitting together on the webbed seats and listening to its distant dry drone and feeling the weight fall on your chest.

Yes.

I am different.

Sitting here, I'm different. I'm wearing the words _Property of The United States Government_. I've got a brain bucket on my head when I'd had a bandanna or a hat before because it won't be goofy self-anointed supervillains who want to freeze me with cartoon foam but Chicom artillery with shards weighing a pound or two or five pounds screaming at me from shells heavier than the gunners sending them crumping off over the horizon from twenty miles away and DPICMs can carpet an entire city block in hundreds of submunitions like a hand grenade and I am afraid. I am afraid and we didn't even get the parade we'd learned from the Marines and Army and Navy and other grunts.

Not even our proud parents on some sweltering deck somewhere while we marched past, boots melting on the pavement in Parris Island's inferno or San Diego or Fort Jackson or Fort Benning. No Fort Bragg goodbyes. No swollen chests, regimental bands, salutes crisply given after months or for the short-timers just a few weeks' brutal pounding rigor and training.

Just...

_Congratulations. You survived selection and advanced training. You're shipping off now, because we need your asses on the front line._

"Kim?" Mom just stood there. Swung a hand in front of my face. I sucked at the joint and met only dead air. It'd gone out. Ash tickled my hand.

"Huh?"

"You just- you were, uh, staring into space."

"How long?" Mom said nothing. It was a worse answer than anything. "I, ah, I gotta- gotta take a shower, I guess."

"Are you really okay to march?"

"I blew off a chink sniper's head at a thousand meters when I was higher than this." Mom said nothing when I swung my legs off the bed, let the sheet drop. Stood up with a stiff-backed at-attention severity.

Caught our stark chiaroscuro in the mirror. Sun-darkened skin still not clawed back to its creamy softness and mom's pallor and only our hair was the same.

We were both the same.

And not.

Mom's lips pursed.

"You- did you know you have abs, Kim?" It was true. It was inane. It was still true.

"Yeah." Sharply drawn. Everything was. Sinewy arms and legs and heavy muscle. I had at least forty pounds on mom, probably. Taller, too.

"You, um, are you gonna shower?"

"Yeah." Stumbled off, tossed the dead joint back on its ashtray. Mom was there; I knew she was. Plucked it off the glass and sniffed at it.

The bathroom was just like I'd remembered it the first day I stumbled in. First days are always the goddamned easiest. At least, that's what you tell yourself. When there's still the euphoria numbing everyone. When there's still the expectation that ineffable something is gonna be different.

_Oh, you can't expect homecoming after eight years, a little more, you can't expect that just to be dropping back into the same rhythm, right?_

That'd just be unreasonable.

Problem is, everybody expects maybe the first week to be hard adjustment. But then the second, that should be easy, right? No one expects their daughter, their big sister, to be another person. Sitting there, the dumb brats in college, time off to be with their war-hero, heroine, whatever sister, and mom and dad, and everyone's in their finest, and it's just back from a dinner where a glass of wine's turned into five tequila shots and then seven and you're falling-down wasted but not dignified enough to be catatonic.

When the inevitable question comes: How was it over there, sis?

Dad's eyes uneasy and mom's smile tight and you can't reel back a question like that any more than you can the answer. You just can't. And everyone's hoping you'll just tell them something they want to hear, some inane platitude, Oh, y'know, it's hard, but I'm back, and it's okay.

But that's not what happens. Because it's only nine in the evening and it's a balmy summer night and the sun hasn't shrunken back under the horizon and the light's so close and so rich and intense you feel it kissing your face like a lover, hot and urgent and irresistible, and you start talking. Start talking and you can't fucking stop.

About the heat on Peleliu. Did I tell you about that, Jim? Tim? Christ, I can tell you two apart now. You're not just twins anymore. But it was a fuckin' nightmare. Just a big goddamn nightmare all the time. You lose so much fucking water weight and there's no clean water anymore. The second week, after we'd gotten used to having regular water supplies, they sank the tanker and sent all that shit down to the bottom. Can you believe that shit?

They drown our goddamn drinking water in water. So you're stuck with what you can process, distill, maybe pull out of these silty sickening pits. Sometimes it's stinking of bodies. It smells like death all the time. You remember that woodchuck you fell face-first into, right, Tim?

That's what it is. All the time. And it's filled with flies. Flies eating those fucking dead chinks and the dying ones, too, and dead and dying Marines and Raiders and special forces troops like us, too. And the fucking rations. We had some Germans. Did you know they give 'em goddamn sauerkraut rations in the tropics?

All of it's just a ball of stench. Foul and a kaleidoscope of insanity. They'd mutilate our dead, you know? They'd cut 'em apart. They'd stick a Marine's dick in his mouth after they cut off his head. They'd do worse shit to women. Did you know they fuck corpses? I'm serious.

And then you feel the eyes on you. That's not what they want to hear, is it?

So you start telling 'em what you're sure they want to hear. The idealized engagement. How it's a stand-up fight, man-to-man, or at least woman-to-man, how you're not drowning in sweat anymore in your eighty pounds of kevlar and rifle plates and with your rifle and ammo and grenades and the willie pete everyone has to have to burn them little motherfuckers out of the fighting positions they copied right out of the japs' own textbook, except the japs were our allies this time.

And it's bayonets jammed into chests, breaking bones, perfect rifle shots. It's not the messy mêlées the way they really are. About how it's setpiece battles and not grinding ordeals, every day the Twelve Trials of Herakles 'cause the chinks caught us off-guard and they could dig in and not even the big one-ton or even two-and-a-half-ton bunker-busters or the thermobarics or anything could puncture their redoubts so it turned into blowtorch and corkscrew again. Men and women with machine guns, high-ex, grenades, flame tanks clattering along like industrial dragons, their crewmen part of the horrible machine sweating grease and wheezing exhaust, nape blasting out in big rolling plumes you could almost see suspended in the air like a kid's diorama in red yarn.

The hideous scream of chinks burned alive. Even the most fanatic and disciplined still breaking under the inexorable rush of liquid fire. When we got air superiority over the island and tore the airfield away from 'em, there were even more. Clattering gunships dancing around coiling creamy SAM contrails and blasting off rockets in silvery white streaks and with sudden infernal flashes in the dark.

The unreality in watching illum going up from artillery and mortars, popping sparking green stars, clusters of malachite fire burning like primeval gods suspended in the firmament turning the universe with their caprice into a world of hard light and dead shadow inky and black and impenetrable at the edges. Life's ambit carved out in those pools; salvation in the light for an Ally and death for a chink and vice-versa outside.

Ghostly fluid fire from the white phosphorous rumbling down. Low-level strikes from the A-10s and the F-18s screaming in fast, snake and nape special invoked with the kind of sorcery people in civilian life either don't know or viscerally fantasize about. _Expend all remaining_ and the world melts.

Meat melts off bones.

Suddenly you're watching the faces and they're still not satisfied with the perfect stand-up battles without blowtorch and corkscrew and swinging around a corner and popping off a sharp stuttering succession of shots every one muffled and distorted and lightless with the suppressor and why can't they understand just how much you're trying to bring them the war they deserve instead of the war where you've just shot up a field hospital and they're all civvies and doctors and some of the park and hotel employees on the island the chinks were either keeping as slaves or protecting and who knew?

What they really want is for you to shut up. Just goddamned shut up.

The shower was hot. Lathered and and perfumed with girlish fruit shampoo. Bergamot soap. I felt the sweat slosh off and it was still there when I stepped out of it.

Still sweating when I'd dragged on the familiar uniform. Olive drab, perfectly cut, the kind of Fort Bragg Barbie Captain Commando shit no one wears outside of the parade ground or hotel parties or maybe ridiculous movies where a new generation of John Wayne confidence men charge up platinum beaches to stirring scores, hundred-foot-tall silver screen white Godzilla, whipping the nips or maybe it's the gooks or is it the chinks this time, another cartoon war somewhere else.

It was still sexy. I wouldn't say it was pretty but a woman in uniform is goddamned sexy. Trudging into the morass of bodies, raucous cheering, idiot faces plastered with the dull dim faintly resentful quality of moribund cows or glassy with reflected patriotism, all the feel-good inanities sinking through their thin skulls and into their plasticky brains.

It was a serious fucking mistake to ask Ron and me to drive together. He wasn't the awkward gangly vaguely chubby kid he'd been eight years ago. Not just hard but steely; a suddenly Prussian old-world severity with a click of heels in every shaken hand with anyone who wanted to shake hands.

But not with me. They'd made sure to dump us in a chauffeured limo, a pathetic deferential dork at the wheel, Oh, Kim, Ron, you two are war heroes! Real live war heroes in my limo!

War heroes.

A hero and heroine.

Had we raised the Red Banner on the Reichstag or liberated Auschwitz or put the last double-tap in Rommel's last minion or shot down the last SS grunts while they held out through the frayed edges of sanity into something deeper and crueler?

No.

We blew up a country and called it pacified.

And then we did it again. And again.

"Christ, lookit all those people." Ron just sat there, slouched against the seat, his black cyborg arm clicking and wheezing against his chest. It looked like what it was: A war machine, as much as the owner was. It wasn't the most heroic tale. Not sinew-snapping bone-breaking mortal combat, fist to fist, bayonet to bayonet with a chinaman. Just the usual screaming artillery rain like those exotic Japanese flowers opening up in water.

Except these were ragged hot metal. A hideous shrill shriek, Ron sprawled out. The shriek wasn't even his. It was Yori's. Attached through the JSSDF and their same magical girl-superhero-cum-commando program.

_Ron, Ron, are you all right? Corpsman! Corpsman! Doc! Get over here! Doc!_

"How's Yori, Ron?" Ron just gave me a drowsy indifferent look. Reeked like an open gin bottle. Sat there, both of us in dress finest on creaking leather reeking of something sterile and chemical like cleanser and with an open bar ignored. Unreality slid past liquid and lurid. Hordes of screaming rowdy civvies hungering for some of that secondhand militarism.

Even when they were swallowing up short-timers like Pez, the layers were still too deep for most of 'em ever to have tasted anything like Service. And even then, a rich town like Middleton, who could expect that?

Ron had grown heavy. Thick. Bullnecked and shoulders like minor mountain ranges and his cyborg arm looked almost pathetic and shriveled like frostbitten rot next to the titanic right one.

"You're really gonna ask me that, Kim?" The voice was testosterone-drowning, too.

"What? Did you think we were supposed to get together?"

"Yeah. Kinda. At first, anyway." Ron's eyes were little unfocused with booze. Pale chestnut colored and flicking away from me. "Lookit all those people. You think they're here for us?"

"Nah. They're here to be here for us."

"You've always been hard, haven't you, Kim?" No more _KP_. "I don't mean that in a bad way. You're goddamned hard."

It's passionate praise for grunts. Hard. You wanna be hard. You wanna be so fucking hard you'll pass through a lion's bowels and come out the other side looking like you're ready for more. So hard John Wayne eats cookies with your name on 'em.

So hard...

"She's okay." Ron finally admitted the question. "She's okay. We- we're not doin' too great. Not really."

"No?" It was hard to sound like I gave a shit. I really didn't. I knew it was ugly. They were inseparable Over There. Every day.

"It's just- what the fuck do you do every day, Kim? Work out? Run? Go to the shooting range? Drink? Fuck? How many times can you fuck before your dick wears out?"

"Is this a rhetorical question?"

"She wants to have a baby."

"Jesus." I hadn't seen Ron smile before that. A vague little quirk.

"Yeah, well, she doesn't wanna be Christmas cake or whatever. She wants to get married. She wants to get knocked up. She wants kids. She wants a normal life."

"Is she normal?"

"Christ, no. She- somebody slammed the door too loud in another apartment, and she was on the floor. She told me she just wanted to lie down on the floor. Like I'd buy that."

"Where is she?"

"Visiting her folks in Japan. They're comin' over soon."

"Too bad. I always liked her-"

"You were always on the make for her." Ron stabbed a finger out at me. Hard accusation. "I mean, like, I- I always kinda knew it, y'know? We wouldn't work out like that. But, hell, I really love you."

"I love you, too, brother." Hands clasped together. Not shaken. No fist-bumping. Just a slow creaking grasp.

"What're you gonna do, Kim?" I didn't know what it was. But when he asked it, it didn't sound like mom or dad or even Tim or Jim or whoever else. That goddamned VA shrink they made me see. Not the accusation. Like all I'd done was just freshman year so how 'bout you get a fucking job?

"I dunno. What about you?"

"If I'm gonna have a kid, I gotta get a job. Cop, maybe?"

"I thought the police were just pogues too fuckin' pussy to hack it through basic."

"Yeah, well, it pays good. I've got some in-demand skills. I mean... You and me, we're both high school dropouts. I'd feel weird going back to school. Gettin' my GED. Or sitting in a fucking high school classroom with the other adult-ed people.

"I mean, wouldn't you feel weird?"

"I dunno. I guess- maybe. I don't know. Are your parents after you?"

"They're Jewish. Of course they are. I'm a fuckin' disappointment. What about yours?"

"They just tiptoe around me like a lit cig in an ammo dump, Ron. I'm not really makin' it too great." Glanced out the window. "It doesn't feel right. Being back here. I'm tired all the time. I shouldn't be.

"I don't goddamn do anything. I mean, remember how fucking tired we were? Back in Hong Kong?"

"Oh, Christ, yeah. It was almost as bad as Peleliu. I mean, don't get me wrong. Nothing was as bad as Peleliu. Okinawa? Guangdong?"

"Maybe. At least you could dig-in there." Ron's robot fingers snapped closed. Opened again. "Ron, do... Can I ask you something?"

"Uh, why would you ask me that, Captain-"

"Shut up, _First Lieutenant_."

"Y'know, I mean, I get why. But it still felt so weird, didn't it? When they gave us our promotions, _you_ were still one step ahead of me."

"I'm better than you."

"I've got more kills than you, Kim."

"I've got better kills." Another laugh. Dry and rasping like a wind through dead leaves. "Remember that shot I got in Okinawa?"

"Goddamn. That's right. Didn't you set a record?"

"Somebody broke it in Russia. Fucker scored almost a four-klick shot on a chink."

"Goddamn. I bet their grape didn't pop like that chink's did. Remember what Bonnie used to call you?"

"Thumper. Yeah. Is Bonnie gonna be there?"

"You didn't hear?" I guess I didn't. It was always ugly. The usual refrain. The goddamned ugly horrible incantation, _Didn't you hear?_

"Hear what?" I was expecting the worst. Dead. Blew her brains out. In uniform, laid open her wrists, sagged down heavy with water into the bath and let out all the red inside her until she turned white.

"Her parents put her away. In the nuthouse, I mean. I mean, y'know, I don't know _why_ first hand, no straight dope, but Wade said she got wasted and came onto her big sister."

"I don't blame her. I'd come onto Bonnie's big sister, too."

"Yeah, well, would you beat the shit out of her 'cause she said, _No_?"

"Bonnie always had a problem with no, didn't she?." It was one of those times when you wondered just what the fuck happened to you when you could just laugh. Laugh thinking about Bonnie with her utilities around her knees, bouncing around with a hand on her belt after a chink prisoner that'd gotten loose, naked with his little cock shrinking in the rubber she pulled over it, one of the men she treated like walking life support for dicks, _Get back here, you little fucker_, before she lost interest and blew his brains out on the concrete from about sixteen meters.

I wanted to ask the question everybody wanted to ask: Do you think there's something wrong with us? But who'd answer it?

The lunatics diagnosing themselves perfectly sane, or totally crazy? What'd be worse?

The limo stopped and now the liveried guy, a huge black man with a demented plaintive smile and a goofy cap and probably much wider horizons than we'd ever had and ever would, he jerked open the door and doffed his cap like we were the King and Queen and not just the sophomore prom.

Actually, Bonnie had been the sophomore prom queen. No fucking idea who the prom king was.

Stepped out with dress boots polished 'til they looked like greased asphalt frozen into shape. First me. Then Ron. It was hot. It was fucking hot and there was a weird and unnatural hush with Mayor Whatshisface and all his pathetic scrabbling cronies like bouncers gone to fat, local government at its finest, petty local tyrants and nephews and brothers-in-law and maybe a few nieces and sisters-in-law and the helter skelter psychosis in squawking PAs.

Red-white-n-blue streamers and Lite beer for the plebs, only three bucks a can, what a steal, and all I wanted was to be wasted or maybe fucked up on grass or some of that divine morphine from the syrettes and don't give me none of that morphine lollipop bullshit, corpsman, if it drives down my heart 'til I'm dead it was just meant to be.

Bonnie called me Thumper but everyone else called us fatalists. I walked through a crush of sweating bodies, beautiful housewives in their parade finest and fluttery white and yellow sundresses and sandals and perfect heels and husbands and daughters and teen-queens with Bette Davis eyes and Bette Davis thighs and hormone-fed tits and long legs and they were all pretty because they were all young but more importantly their eyes had the quality ours didn't.

I wished Yori had been there. And Wade. And Bonnie. And everyone else. O'Connell and Miyoshi and Chan from Hong Kong and Liu and Won from Taipei and Nkwungu who'd come all the way from the fucking Congo to volunteer for the Army and learned he was better-equipped for black ops like all of us and the millions of other names you'd need a shrine longer than the goddamned Great Wall to give 'em all a place to sleep forever.

The pillar of smoke and the neon psychedelic mushroom cloud fountaining in a universe of dust and noise and third-degree-burns-at-ten-klicks nuclear nightmare in Kowloon when the chinks pulled out and everyone said, Well, let's not push it too goddamn far, they blew up their own country, let's not drop more nukes. Right?

The day was hotter than that afternoon because it'd been September and then the rains were black and if you walked out in them for a few weeks without a full MOPP suit rooting out the chinks in the rubble you'd glow in the dark. Cheers. I didn't really even hear what anyone said. I just stood there with Ron.

There was a weird out-of-body quality. I was there. My mom and dad and Tim and Jim were there and Ron's parents, blond and German and Jewish, and everyone in their full dapper elegance, perfectly cut suits for the 'fifties Ward Cleaver guys and dresses for the women and I wondered if maybe this must've been how it'd felt for someone back from Vietnam or maybe Korea or maybe World War II fifty, sixty, seventy years before that.

If they had to swallow all the bullshit, too. If they felt the hideous sweat crawling down the backs of their necks and more than anything they were afraid someone would pull away the backdrop, all the inanity, all the ra-ra feel-good production, and there'd be a judge sitting there. Not just a judge but a chink judge, or a gook judge, or a nip judge, and the entire jury were made out of the dead, the rotting dead, flesh bloated and blackened and falling away from their bones and the judge in this one should've been Sorry Charlie on the Guangdong with his horrible stygian wisdom telling you the truth you didn't want to hear.

"Our heroes have some important things to say. Won't you give them a warm Middleton welcome? I'm sure a lot of you know them from high school. I'm sure some of you know them from the TV." The Mayor's voice was a faraway tingle somewhere in my head.

All the kids' stupid stares and the grownups' and they were the same ones, too, they made me sick. I just wanted to tell them about Sorry Charlie. I wanted to tell them what their comfort and safety and their Capitalism and their independence and more than anything what their petty petulant dominoes and what their self-assurance-turned-hubris and their shopping malls meant.

I wanted to stand there and slap my palms on the lectern and scream: Goddamn all of you. Goddamn all of you. You sent us there. Ron and me and Bonnie and Yori and Wade and Nkwungu and Daddy and Freako-Boy and Razorback and Hognose and Whopper 'cause they serve whoppers at BK and Bravo Kilo means baby-killer, and what about Payback, what about Snowflake, big fierce gorgeous black woman lying in a ditch somewhere on a Kowloon street buried under ten million tons of rubble, her soul floating somewhere over the Pacific, and what about all those millions and millions of chinks and what about the flips who fought with us and what about the flips who fought against us and the okis who wanted our Marines off their goddamn island and the japs, too, for good measure, and do you know what?

We goddamn hated the chinks but they were hard. They were fucking hard and tough. They were hard like little yellow slant-eyed drill instructors and they were some of the finest hardest individuals we'd ever had the good fortune to fight, and we wouldn't mind if they came back and married our sisters and our brothers and we'd be happy to be there to watch 'em fuck 'em and we were pretty sure they felt the same about us.

We weren't some feel-good Band of Brothers like _Henry V_. We lived together in filth rotting for weeks and months. We fought two-month battles eating shitty rations every day that were supposed to be for no more than a week. We killed. Jesus, the people we killed. Our tours of duty turned into circumnavigations through eight goddamned years when it was supposed to be one.

No one asked us if we wanted to re-up.

No one asked us anything.

You didn't ask us anything.

"I want you to clap your hearts out for Kimberly Ann Possible and Ronald Stoppable and for our heroes who couldn't make it here today." I guessed Wade had gotten out of it.

God knew how.

At least Bonnie did it by being Bonnie.

We walked up to the podium. But I don't even remember what I said. I think it was something bland, about how happy we were to be back, wow, what a great crowd, I remember some of you from high school, and keep buying war bonds, everybody, because...

God knew why.

And then it hit me.

I didn't say anything. I was standing there, sure I was already finished, a glance over at Ron who gave me one of those worried looks I remember back when my hands wouldn't stop trembling. Kind of a problem for a sniper and FO with the SOFLAM.

Doc Hudson eventually needed to put me on morphine, give me the Burroughs treatment, just to get me back into some kind of normality.

_I don't wanna do this, L-T, but you're gonna hafta give yourself some morphine shots until this shit calms down. We need you too much right now._

"Kim. Christ, Kim, what's wrong?" Ron's voice a hard rasp in my left ear. Palms on the podium. Hot white light bleaching the world and stealing its color and grade and suddenly it was like those times when you'd turn away from a village with the world on fire on the Mainland or in the Philippines or even Okinawa, when suddenly the simple crushing awfulness would turn gray like an old black-and-white picture where what little blood there was had been Hershey's syrup except there were bowels from chewed-up Marines still drooling shit and women with bayonets jammed between their thighs and babies coming out from artillery gashes stillborn and chinks and okis and flips and our own and theirs and whoever rotting twisted in the field and you just couldn't take it.

"I- I'm sorry, I... You know, I've always been a nervous public speaker." Swallowing. Quavering hands. I want to tell all of you sonsofbitches just what it was like over there, what it's _still_ like in Russia and China while we're still goddamned fighting, why we can't get involved in the shit in Africa and South America now, why we just need to say: Let's stop.

Why I had an application from Veterans Against The Wars and was just too damn craven to mail it in.

Because let me tell you something about war: It doesn't take any courage at all. It's cowardice to shrink from those tasks, but there's no more courage in throwing yourself at a machine gun nest or a gun battery or through a door into bristling Kalash barrels blasting off heat and light and brimstone than getting up to turn off a light.

Do you want to know what I'm thinking about? It's about that woman and her kids in that small house that was really more of a hut, dirty wood and stone, the terminal point of all of our feel-good words about Capitalism and Growth and how much we're Benefiting the Chinese, Let's Lead Them Away from Communism.

I was afraid.

I was afraid and we'd taken fire from a cluster of huts so I sent the door clattering open with a boot and swung around the corner and I could see myself afterwards in the third person like I was someone else. I saw my silhouette, the ferocious sexless thing in dirty tiger stripe battledress and heavy body armor and without a kevlar pot but a 'do-rag wrapped around my coppery hair grown oily and flat with dust and I saw the rifle throb and spit out death in big muzzle flashes and then I was looking at the woman splayed there in a dirty puddle with her three kids, eyes open, everything open.

And one of the kids was still sucking down breath, wheezing and shallow, so I blew the little bastard's brains out because it was the right thing to do.

And I don't want to cry and I don't want to do anything but say, Yeah, that happened. I don't even know if I feel bad but I think I feel really bad I feel that way. Because that could be any one of you. Don't you see that?

"I- I should just- you know, ah... I'm sorry. Please buy war bonds, every-"

And then there was kind of nothing. Ash-white but with the pretty Chinese lady's face in my eyes. And her kids', too. And the little girl with her head coming apart like an overripe apple under a hydraulic press.

"Honey, are you sure you don't want to talk about it?" Mom just kept asking the same goddamn question and dad didn't want to ask anything. The way he always got, the big man suddenly not the big man I remember anymore. Still kind of a matinée-handsome Ward Cleaver but he looked so small, sitting there at the kitchen table, mom shoveling takeout from the Great Wall of China restaurant on my plate without even a glitter of irony.

I hadn't started crying or broken down. I just kinda froze. I froze and Ron, goddamn, Ron, the public speaker from hell, he had to go on and say, Wow, you know, eight years in the Pacific, and Kim has to choose today to get heatstroke, but she's okay. Really.

Thanks.

I wasn't okay. I wasn't gonna be okay. It wasn't epiphany as much as it was just the feeling when you're sure, when you don't just know but you can taste how much reality fortifies the goddamned obvious. When you're standing there in a field of blood and death and you know, totally and fully, 'cause it's eaten you alive and sucked you into the soil and suddenly you've been reborn, recast as something else entirely.

You're not the teenage heroine teenage girls have posters of on their wall, and not just with some discreet-fumblings-at-midnight fantasy. You're not the one teenage boys fawn over. You're not a TV celeb.

You're a soldier. And you're a killer. You're a goddamned killer and suddenly it's not just once, not just an accident. You've felt the cold silty mud under your knees while you've wrapped your fingers around a chink neck and cracked their helmet down on the hard coral and you saw a Marine, a twenty-two-year-old Marine Sergeant gone totally fucking crazy trying to claw into with his bare fingers 'til they were turned to red paste and he couldn't stop screaming.

And you squeezed and squeezed and you didn't even say anything. Just felt the hands scrabble helplessly and hopelessly at your shoulders and your vest while Ron sledgehammered a rifle stock into another chink paratrooper's face 'til it gave into a spidering web of red and Yori was daggering a knife into someone else's throat and Bonnie set off five fast pistol shots, _bangbangbangbang__bang_, so quick I knew and you knew too they weren't aimed but you didn't need to at that range.

And your face went scarlet and then purple and so did the chink's and you saw yourself perfectly in the black slit eyes and then everything went limp and you had to keep squeezing 'til they died. And then you smiled and laughed and so did Ron and Wade had taken off one of the paratroopers' heads with a shotgun blast at close quarters, wearing huge clods of meat and short hair and bone.

Listening to Alice Cooper, _Eighteen_, we weren't even eighteen then, were we? Sixteen, seventeen, and we liked it, confused and lonely and happy and horrific.

"I- there's nothing to say, mom. I just froze up. I'm not much of a public speaker."

"You were debate club president." Was I? Mom just stood and stared there blankly.

"Jesus, just forget about it-"

"Language, Kimberly Ann. Language." Dad contributing helpfully.

"Oh, stick it up your ass." Jerking away from the table. Sudden white-hot rage and I could kill you, dad. Just like that. Crush your trachea and leave you wheezing on the floor and not even because I hate you. Clattering and clanging silver, fingers steepled on my forehead, stalking out into an unfamiliar place I still knew through muscle memory. Stumbling off to my bedroom. Wrenching open the door like a goddamned sixteen-year-old.

That's what I still was, wasn't I? Groping for my shitty Taiwanese brandy and finding absolutely nothing there.

"Honey?" Mom just stood there. No. She loomed.

"Where's my fucking booze-"

"Kim, will you talk to somebody?" Didn't even turn. Just reached for the roach. It wasn't there, either.

"Christ, you took my weed, too? That ain't cheap-"

"Listen, I understand you're- you're not you right now. But will you talk to someone?"

"Who? That head-shrinker at the VA again? Telling me what, exactly? It's natural to feel this way. Oh, it'll take some adjustment. But, golly-gee, it'll all be great again soon-"

"She's in my hospital. She has a good practice. She's really well-respected."

"Another goddamn pogue."

"What the hell does that mean, Kim?"

"Person other than grunt." It meant you were a goddamned pogue if you didn't know what it meant. "And a fuckin' fag-"

"Dr. Go is a distinguished professional in her field. In- in trauma care."

"I ain't traumatized. I'm awake."

"Just see her. One session."

"What kind of dumbass name is Dr. Go?"

"Tell me you'll see her, and I'll get you as much grass as you want, okay?"

"Deal. Christ."

"And tell your father you're sorry. Even if you don't mean it."

Just flopped down on the bed, an arm over my face.

"I need some weed first-"

"Kimberly?"

"What? Want me to get my cheerleader costume on and do a little dance-"

"Just say, Dad, I'm sorry. That's it."

Blow it out your ass, too, mommy.

"Sure."

The hospital was exactly what I'd remembered. Ostentatious. Not like one of the field hospitals or even the Navy pogue fantasyland in Yokosuka. Grandiose black marble or at least a respectable parody of it layered on the lobby's floor and twinkling in big monolith slabs and pretty nurses or receptionists in sexy nurse costumes manning the desks and it was more of a medical hotel than anything else, bigass towering atrium rising up along a succession of layer-cake decks with a piano tinkling through a haze of gurgling cool water.

Pricey pretentious coffee hawked from carts on every level. And the still sickening stink of disinfectant smothering what the field hospitals never had enough antiseptic to put down. Death's odors, sweet-putrid rot. No men and women groaning, armless, legless, a hideous vision of a human fetus with everything but the head amputated, stumps thrashing around in the sudden post-op epiphany surfacing from anesthesia and learning you're a goddamned waking potato without even a cock.

What's the point?

"You okay, Kim?" And mom with her trim white skirt and blouse again, creamy heels clip-clopping, lab coat with _Dr. Ann Possible, MD, PhD, _neurosurgeon extraordinaire with a daughter they'd never even given a fucking chance to graduate from high school.

I knew I was an embarrassment. A heroic embarrassment. Dr. Go's office was on the fifth floor, away from all the bodies' rot and a place of pill-rotting brains, the psych wing on the living side of a heavy polarized window into the authentic nut ward for the far-gone section eight cases.

"Are you going to be all right?" More questions. What'd they mean? Goddamned nothing. That was it. Wishing for Alice Cooper on the radio, but it was just that tinkling boring piano and subdued droning through the speakers could've been anything from muzak to the _Best of Yanni_ to the Stones to whatever.

I just stood there. Stood in front of the heavy wooden door in the white-paneled hallway with black-and-white checkerboard floors like a mod nightmare. Wondering what the fuck I was supposed to do.

Mom had walked away. Just said: I trust you to walk into Dr. Go's office and not make her wait, all right? Just talk to her.

So I walked into the office.

"Jesus fucking Christ." Real tactful, I know.

If you've seen one shrink's office, you've seen 'em all. I didn't know what I'd been expecting, but it sure as shit wasn't this. She was beautiful. She was absolutely gorgeous. Long and willowy and still with the kind of flowing muscular athleticism that said something about being a gymnast or maybe a weightlifter, high reps low weight and firm and perky.

The office was gray. Perfectly gray. Melancholic charcoal sofa and pebbled institutional carpeting like somebody'd digested and spit up gravel; just like a high school. Only the ceiling wasn't gray, and I was pretty sure that was out of impossibility. Even the walls were. Even the bookshelves and the books groaning on them were.

Dr. Go's suit was, too. Tight pencil skirt cinching into perfect shapely thighs clasped in shimmery graphite pantyhose or stockings and incredible long legs and even a glistening lead-colored blouse. I was pretty sure her jacket must've been her skirt's color.

But that wasn't what set it off. It was the slanted eyes with a hue like bright polished emeralds. Like a star cluster. Like my eyes. The soft pink-painted lips and glossy black hair long and full and pouring down her shoulders and more than anything that she was-

"You're Chinese." Yeah. That. Dr. Go was Chinese.

"That's right. My name is Dr. Go Xi. Or Xi Go, I guess."

"She...Go?" What the fuck kind of name was that? I wasn't in a position to criticize. What kinda dumbass name is Kim Possible?

"Sit down, please. Your mom said you needed to see a therapist?" Great. That was one phrase for it. I sat. Sort of.

"I- I just- I don't think I belong here. Not really." I didn't think I did. But Shego, she just sat primly, swung one perfect long leg over the other, enthroned on her big overstuffed arm chair. And the usual pad came out. "Jesus, put that fuckin' pad away-"

"All right."

"I- there's no reason for me to be here, okay? I'm sorry for wastin' your time."

I guess I'd been expecting something, Now, now, don't get up. Don't waste my time. Don't you want to talk? But I didn't hear anything when I got up.

When I jerked open the door. Just her patient stare behind a pair of fragile round glasses. She was pretty. No. She was gorgeous. Elegantly made-up. More than anything, she looked like the Chinese woman with her kids.

That was why I was lying on the sofa. Not even talking _with_ her but talking to her. And she just listened. Listened to, hell, to the fear and loathing. To the hate. Pain. The drugged-out psychosis. The far-out psychosis, listening to Ron and Yori rutting together, pussy sopping and still just wondering: What could've been?

That was the forever thought. The center of my universe. Just thinking about that with that kind of crushing hot grasp on my gut. _What if?_ What if I'd been born to different parents? What if I'd broken my leg before all that superheroine shit started or maybe what if I'd been in a wheelchair or a back brace or just said: No? No. No. I wanna be a regular everyday girl. I wanna be happy. I wanna...

It wasn't I'd never cried before. The tears were just bitter, so goddamn bitter you'd die if you tasted them.

And then I just jerked up and walked out mid-sentence. I couldn't fuckin' talk anymore.

But I was back the next week.

And the week after that. And the week after that. And it wasn't like it meant shit. It was just talking. More than anything, it was dreading what that fucking Mayor Belzer expected of me.

Give the high school brats a nice pep talk. Tell 'em just how ennobling it is to wear Army green or Navy white or Marine dress blues or, Christ, go full-bore pogue REMF and wear a zoomie uniform with cute sunglasses. At least even the worst Navy REMF still was in the field, on the islands sweating and grunting. In China. Seabees and support troops and they at least usually volunteered as litter bearers, artillery helpers, shit, they were usually getting overrun again and again and were out there on the front, too.

"But you think it would be wrong to talk to the kids at your old high school, Kim?" I never got the whole shrink shitshow. Fine, talk about it. Maybe it's therapeutic. But who pulls down six or seven figures and claims to be a doctor asking obvious questions?

Something about the question set me off. It wasn't even Shego's fault. Just the goddamn idea. Had me springing off the couch.

"What? Should I tell 'em the real truth?" Laughing. And laughing. That bitter hard laughter. "Their TV superheroine cuts throats? Kills babies? Huh? Child soldiers and just children? What- what about the chink bitch with your face, huh, Doctor Shego? You think I'm such a nice person?

"I blasted her like everybody else. I was through that door and it wasn't even like calling down an artillery or airstrike. I shot her apart right up-close. Distance between you and me." Arms up, not a kiddie pantomime but with my finger in the trigger guard, pulling that clammy crescent, not her sweet-smelling office with a tinge of Shego's milky-soft perfume but charcoal and old wood and filthy clothing and stale rice and a full-auto blast, perfectly controlled, cutting her apart.

"Do you want to know what I felt, Doctor Shego?"

She said nothing.

"When I turned her inside-out and then her kids and blew out the last one's brains, right up-close, so goddamn close it burned the little fucker's forehead?"

"Only if you want to tell me."

"Recoil." And then I stepped out of the office, 'cause it was fuckin' bullshit.

But everything else was, too. Which was why I just wasn't goddamned bothering anymore. Calling it a bender would've been charitable. It was just a succession of messy mortifying moments, a spluttering drunk like a dying steam engine straggling from station to station bleeding black smoke. An inkling of beautiful women, soft lips and quiet murmurs and waking up in someone else's bed. Of shocking stupid horrible things I never should've said.

Inexplicable idiotic things. A collision with Ron in a hotel bar and seeing him pretending he didn't even know me, a shrug at beautiful willowy Yamato Nadeshiko Yori and her buck-toothed-coke-bottle-glasses dad and pretty mom. And I was holding court with the hookers and people eager to inch the fuck away from me, but I'd never let 'em.

Putting down the routines.

_You know what it looks like when you gut a chink?_

_You know what a real soldier feels when they kill somebody?_

Did you ever kill women and children?

_Oh, sure. _

How can you do that?

_Just don't lead 'em so much. Har har har. _That one was old before I heard it for real, a door gunner giving us the thumbs-up, naked except for his flak jacket and radio in the low-level wet humid hell, hunched on his kevlar pot and another flak jacket and squatting behind his minigun. _Blrrrp_ and the paddy waters boil and there they go, bos and little girls and boys and women and men.

The one thing they'd never heard: What's the most dangerous goddamn thing in the world?

An American boy or girl with a rifle in a foreign country and let loose.

How Pappy collected hands. A goddamned fetishist. Dried 'em out in the sun and carried them in an old gas mask bag he'd filched off a chink Marine. Tough goddamned Marines. Like chewing old leather. He'd had an epiphany one day: What's the scariest part of a man in war?

It's his hand. It's the hand kills y'all, right?

Pappy was a hoary old man for teenagers. Thirty-two, an authentic vet, thrown into it a few days away from his tour's end when the chinks hit Okinawa and he'd moved on from the Marine Raiders to our outfit and he had that faraway broken-glass look in his eyes you only get when you give up a seriously important part of your center.

So Pappy took out his machete, whacked off hands and dried 'em out and used 'em as injun medicine. He got it with Daddy and Donovan and Redman when the infiltrators came through the lines close to Chongqing, cutting throats at the A-camp and chucking in grenades and satchel charges.

When we left, when our embarrassing little secret got tossed into the archival fire, Null Group was a dead outfit, anyway. A hundred operators at its full complement, a fucking company, and when we were finished there was barely a platoon.

I wasn't exactly sober, but I wasn't shitfaced, either. It was kinda the plan. Mom was pissed at me. Dad was. And I was pissed with myself for God knew what reason and I'm sure it was every fuckin' reason, anyway. In a quiet little bar, one of the only places in driving distance I wanted to see the inside of or hadn't gotten thrown out of, and it was intimate and warm and dark and the lights burning in the low-slung chandeliers were so soft and close they drowned you in wet bronze. Subdued murmuring music.

Just staggered into the place. I barely even knew what it was. I'd just passed it once or twice. Not even driving. Just walking, hell, shuffling down what qualified as something like a downtown. It was a little claustrophobic, a half-step down from a street hardly busy but burning with heat shimmers twisting themselves into malevolent swirling eddies of light. I could see and not see; living half-in, half-out, loaches and gunships doing their two-inches-off-the-pad ballet, Nightstalkers and just the usual hog drivers, thirty-year vets and kids so goddamn green you could burn 'em in the broken hulks and they'd just walk out singed.

A wide dance floor with a few girls and women. Skirts and heels and suits and not the usual pungent stamp of stale booze and rotgut and upended stomachs and sawdust and blood and no crunching on teeth with a pair of knucks as their dentist.

I didn't know what the fuck the place was. For about a quarter-second. And then it hit me like a sledgehammer plunging out of the sky on a long-forgotten piece of the Mir. Slow wheeling movements. A dull throbbing melody, sonorous but with enough larruping bass to tremble up your guts.

Only girls. Only women. Late high school chicks in too goddamned much makeup with pretensions of adulthood and way-too-old-to-be-doing-this beauties faded like Blanche DuBois lurking in the bar's dark shadows.

And worse than anything, Shego at a low table I passed and suddenly there was a hard snap of _something_. A thought, a wish, a prayer: Maybe she won't notice me. I sure as hell noticed her. But too late. It was the clothes. She was already a vision, well, a wet-dream vision in her suit, tight trim pert and busty and now this was a bridge too fucking far. This was a chromium-green dress wrapped about a size smaller than her skin with tits pillowy and milky and soft fountaining out of a seam that's maybe deliberately too tight and her glasses are the same but nothing else is but she's still the same woman and maybe this was how the beautiful Chinese woman I turned into smoke got her kids, or maybe she had a husband waiting for her, or maybe another wife, Christ, who knows, did the chinks let chinkettes get married to other chinkettes or was everything about churning out new chinks for the Perpetual Revolution?

But the skirt was pretty much all slit and her legs were longer than anything I'd ever seen and her heels were emerald and she wore viridian stockings glittering with big fistfuls of starlight and I wanted to touch them. I wanted to find out how they tasted and keep tasting.

I wanted to get down on my knees and ask her for somebody else: Did it hurt when I killed you? Was it as painful as the times I've been shot, stabbed, bayoneted, charred, thrown out of choppers, given too many traumatic brain injuries that don't keep away any memories but the good ones, that sent blood slopping down my face with gravity's help up to my hairline because the Marine Venom took one too goddamn many hits and decided it'd rather sleep it off on its back after the Jesus nut gave with a scream and the main rotor turned into a boomerang and the tail rotor just about fucking popped off with the whole boom and the world turned into a universe of screaming and prayers and someone was chattering the Lord's Prayer next to my ear and it hit me that it wasn't me, I didn't care, I wasn't afraid and I wasn't not afraid I was just there in the moment learning in words what I'd always felt which was you don't have any control over even your immediate universe.

Did it hurt you when I killed you? Were you happy I killed you first, almost cut you in half with a blast of 6.8s before I shot your children? Are you in heaven? In hell? Is there nothing else there? Is your soul still there, or is there not a soul at all and just electrical impulses arcing through the protein-rich gray meat between everyone's ears, all the neurons arranged like the jewels in a precision watch's action?

Am I going to hell when I die?

Do they have a PX in hell?

A hope clutched to my heart: Just let me pass by.

"Oh, Kim!" Shit. But what can you do? Turn and say something stupid like, Oh, do I know you? 'course I fucking know you. You know _me_. Shego at a low table with other girls, all of 'em beautiful. Desperately. Girlfriends or just sucking down the clinging sweet lizzie ambiance.

I could already hear it. Show off a petri dish headcase specimen for all her beautiful shrink friends. Long and pretty and black and white and brown and-

"This is my friend, Kim." Shego just got up. It wasn't what I'd been expecting. Standing there, stupid, awkward, jeans and combat boots and heavy sinewy muscle straining against a black tee-shirt with biceps bulging through the sleeves. "I didn't know you'd be here tonight, honey."

_Friend_, huh?

Soft little murmurs from the chorus of faces levitating over big chests.

Shego pulling me onto the floor.

"What the fuck are you doing, _Doctor_-"

"Doctor who, Kim? I'm not your doctor tonight. I don't think you need a doctor tonight. You know what I think you need?" Shego could dance _really_ well. Those firm legs weren't just from step aerobics or jazzercise or jogging.

"Shego-"

"I like that. You know, you've been calling me that for awhile, and I didn't really get why. Xi Go. Shego. The only person who ever called me that was my little sister when we first came here. Just off the boat."

I didn't get what she was doing. _Why_ she was doing it.

Or was this what normal people did? Close to her, Shego's breasts soft and full. Wafting blood-warmed fragrance of vanilla and Coca-Cola and something else. Something uniquely hers. Jasmine, maybe. Or tropical fruit. Her hair loose and slicked down and flatter than it'd been in the office, glistening with something like onyx.

"You're- what're you-"

"Kim, do you remember what you told me? Dance with me, won't you?" So I did. It was a slow dance. Not head-on-shoulders-awkward prom shit other people had when Bonnie was flicking bits of coral rock and shrapnel into the chink machine-gunner's head. Dark throbbing rhythm. Everything went dark.

Impossible and unreal.

"I'm a bad dancer, Shego-"

"You _are_ a really bad dancer. But you're still a girl." If you could get closer, we were. The world tumbled around us and we were still and everything moved like shadows when you're sitting in a room watching the trees huddled close around your window smear their sundial gloom across the wall.

"Thanks. I guess. This- you don't have to be-"

"Shut up, all right, Kim? If you're going to say something- something that's not _this_ Kim, right now, I don't want to hear it."

"Is this some kinda new therapeutic technique?"

"Do you remember what you told me once, Kim? During one of our sessions?"

"I thought I wasn't allowed-"

"Don't be a smartass." Shego's voice had grown thicker, harder. An intimate husky whisper.

"Fine."

"Do you remember?"

"TBI, remember?"

"You said: Sometimes, I just wish I could be someone else. Sometimes, I just wish I could be another girl. Another person with another life. Another destiny. I wish I could walk off this path and meet somebody else's and I could just be as normal as they are.

"So why not be?"

"'cause it's bullshit-"

"Is it anymore bullshit than getting wasted every night, smoking your bodyweight in grass, screaming at your psychiatrist about a Chinese woman you still remember more than all the other- how many people have you killed, Kim?"

"Eight hundred. Confirmed." Ain't the _confirmed_ nice? And God only knew how many I really had.

"Fine. Then be someone else. Be someone who went to her senior prom. Who thinks every night: Why is my life so boring, so uneventful?"

"I don't get to be a world-traveler, a bush pilot?" Shego smiled, at least. It was slow and syrupy and it hit me: Her lips were painted black. Bitumen black. Iced obsidian black.

"Just be you. Kim. Right now? Okay? Put your hands on my hips. Be my girlfriend right now." I wasn't gonna complain. Wasn't gonna whine or bitch about anything.

And I didn't. It wasn't even the gallery of ghosts and the leering faces of the dead had gone. Sorry Charlie was still there, where he'd always been, head lopped off a Chicom sapper and skewered on a stake in front of the camp outside Guangdong in the heat and the sweltering tropical valleys and concertina and tanglefoot and mines, that endless smile because he knew the Joke and he'd seen the Other Side and it wasn't warm there and it wasn't cold, either. The dead were safe.

Nobody else was.

But I guess they were farther away. And Shego was a lot closer. A mother's warmth and a lover's heat and suddenly we weren't even dancing anymore. Her apartment was nice. I guess. Honestly, I barely caught any of it. Just a white room with black curtains. A bed between a pair of heavy wooden stands.

Everything was black and white. Impossible monochrome; white sheets and black trim and the curtains dripped crude oil shadows swirling and canting across the alabaster walls with headlights' slow faraway movement through the abyss under the condo tower where she lived.

The only color was Shego. Was her dress wound tight around her creamy skin. The stockings still clinging to those perfect long lean legs when she sent it dropping to the floor. No bra and only a pair of vanishing panties in dragonfly metal-green.

It wasn't tank-green.

Wasn't even one of the kaleidoscope of colors in the valleys, the mythical six shades of green before they were churned to mulch and mud and blood and ash with the 155s and snake-and-nape with the fast-movers coming down, roaring and hungry and hunting.

I wasn't back there. For once. Her fingertips on my cheeks. I was afraid.

"This isn't your first time, right, Kim?" Long and slow and her long fingers burning up my chin, carding into my hair. Hers like a cowl made from black silk.

"No."

"Good." A kiss. A kiss and I didn't know if I'd really ever kissed like that. Another Kim never had. Never kissed Ron. Never kissed Bonnie. Never even kissed Yori. But Shego kissed me, long and firm and hot, thickly glossed lips a sticky little whisper and the world swam and I was breathless and all I wanted was to see more of her skin.

More of her heavy hand-filling breasts and I finally just _touched_ them. Palms sleeking down her hair and drifting over her shoulders' hot skin and settling there. Scalding skin and cool areolae smooth like silk and her nipples starting to pebble.

"Just like that." How many times had I ever been with a girl sober?

And how many times had I ever been with one without a word like _fuck_? How many girls had I fucked?

But how many had I just had sex with? I'd never made love before.

Shego's tongue slippery and teasing between my lips and flicked at my teeth and coaxing mine out, tangling and levitating between us. Shirt shucked off with a fast unceremonious grace and silent music of bodies knotting together. Perfect fingers that'd never known bullets' oily glitter and that'd never grown hard and callused and never felt the blood sticky and thick hooked into my jeans' waistband and jerking 'em down, faster, faster, faster, sinking down on my back, a game of legs in the air.

Shego's lips almost gluey, a wet lingering heat on my ankle. No more socks. Naked feet teased with her tongue up and down my toes and pouring higher, higher. I wasn't afraid. Not afraid of the dark anymore; not with her. Because that Kim wasn't afraid. Fingers knotting in her hair when Shego's cheeks burned up my thighs; heard and felt and tasted every little tingling graze, each fine filament pouring into that perfect seamless whole but they were all there alone, too.

Her tongue a merciless cruel tease at my left thigh; bouncing from right to left left to right left right left right marching cadence and no napalm sticks to kids on my lips, joyous and horrible. Just her fingers bracketing my pussy's flesh with a fiery sizzle. Teased apart with a wicked little tug and then easing back together and finally peeled open with a sound like a plum giving.

"S-Shego! Shego! Fuck!" Her mouth was there, hot and pitiless and implacable. Hungry. Tongue slippery with a delicate little texture and pulled up up up between the lips and coiling around my clit with a lightning blue spark. "Shego, I-"

I came. Just like that. The second two impossibly perfect long elegant fingers twisted themselves into me, splitting me apart like an overripe peach. Found that spot inside me and petted, slow, firm.

A scent of sopping fragrant femininity and her shampoo and perfume and her apartment's strange jumble of sautéed meat and vegetables from the kitchen and women's sweat clean and crisp and a sharp stab of spring and something almost sickeningly sweet when she peeled me apart and just fucking _ate_. Tongue slithering between her fingers spreading me open wide and my heels kicking at the crisp white sheets in the darkness glowing like a carpet of moonlight and Shego's skin phosphorescent and I came.

Again. Again. Toes curling, fingers ripping, grasping at the bedding, a hot red movement in big lurching waves boiling down between trembling thighs with sinew and muscle like steel bands tightening and my back arching, head thrown back, silent scream rising out of my lips like smoke.

And then Shego kissed me. Mouth on mine and that was what I tasted like tonight, beautifully sweet, oppressively sweet, a tinge of something a little musky and her smile was quiet laughter. Fingers knotting together and thighs clasped against and around thighs. Heat and movement.

Shego's fingers questing after mine. Long willowy divinity.

Pussies together in the kind of vertical kiss wet dreams are made of. The kind of moment and movement you'd never forget even when your brain's fit to be taken with milk and brown sugar and raisins. It was the kind of moment that could send you through love's happy valley of purified madness, reeling and shaking.

Shego's body delirium in smoothness, drum-tight skin with a kiss of perpetual baby-fat like a teenager and I hadn't even asked her how old she was. Just figured it was as timeless as most Chinese women looked; thirty, sixty, what's the difference?

It wasn't fucking. Melting together. Pussies sparking, wet and spluttering, her clit a bare wire worked into every nerve and sending my back bowing, hers lurching at me, tight belly against a sinewy abdomen but for a half-second pulling itself like taffy into eternity I was that cheerleader again.

I wanted to be. I wanted to be in love and maybe I would be. Maybe it would be with Shego or maybe it would be with an illusion or maybe it just would be.

But I didn't care. It was something I hadn't felt for too goddamned long. Not apathy but just feeling all the weight melt off my brain and Shego kissed me, and I kissed her, kissed her, kissed her. We ground together, drenched, greasy together, oiled with sweat, no words but perfect incantations to lust, to hunger, fuck, fuck, oh, fuck, Kim, Shego, God, that's... Just... Just like that.

Trembling and twitching, high-wire and high-tension cables snaking through my body and electrifying and electrocuting and I could feel something more than just orgasm starting to simmer and steam and gather in a heavy thick syrup and crust and then break and I screamed. Screamed while it shot through me, a tight red cord in the blood.

There was something else. One of those Japanese flowers, and it was mine. Only uniquely mine and in a flash of impossible light I saw Shego and she wasn't the Chinese woman because I wasn't that Kim anymore. Just for a second.

But it was long enough. I was sure of that. I just kept kissing her. Kept adoring her. Tits clasped together and nipples screaming against each other's and slopping with sweat and rejoicing in the stagnant torpid heat without a fan and with nothing more than a clean velvety breeze wafting on broiling skin.

Loving her lips; tasting her lashes' serried satin shapes sculpting themselves in dying seconds of movement through the air.

Orgasm sledgehammering itself into your brain. Caromboling up and down every nerve and crushing your gut and sending your body swirling into a black abyss without anything but a pure perfect polarized sensation. I loved it.

Loved everything.

In love with the world and nothing really mattered and that was more important than anything I'd had, I'd felt, since the afternoon Major Torvaldson and his sniveling little adjutant with the receding chin and rodent face made from hollow cheeks and a knifing nose and beady dumb eyes stood on my parents' porch and told me: Kim, your country needs you. Won't you be there for your country?

I didn't care anymore. I was in love with this instant. With Shego. Arms wrapped around her and legs quivering together and Shego's boiling through stockings running translucent with sweat and I knew and felt and saw even in the dark. Luxuriated in that seam between oiled-silk skin and crisp fabric.

Lying there while orgasm sank itself into my brain and blasted itself back through my eyes and my nose.

I just lay there, held her. Waiting for morning.

"Kim?" Shego's voice was a soft little murmur, just loud enough to hear over the Alice Cooper I'd asked her to put on. _I'm Eighteen_. What? Should I expect originality from myself?

"Yeah, Shego?" Shego's cheek against my chest. A palm on my left biceps. I'd felt something strange. That drowsy flicker when you can just let yourself get swallowed into sleep. But without a water glass of brandy. Without a joint's blue giddy idiocy winding itself around every neuron.

"Do you want to keep seeing me?"

"What? As, ah, as a doctor-and-patient-"

"We can't do this if we do that."

"As what, then?"

"Want to make the lie official?"

I felt the smile. The desperately stupid smile. I didn't know her. She didn't know me. All I knew was she was a pretty and smart Chinese woman who could probably tie a cherry stem with her tongue.

"Yeah."

That night, I had a dream I was someone else. And when I woke up, I wasn't.

But that was all right.


End file.
